H5N1

Tag archives for H5N1

Been a while, so these cover a span of reading. I’m in the midst of my friend Adrienne Mayor’s The Poison King: The Life and Legend of Mithradates, Rome’s Deadliest Enemy, and can report that Mr. M is quite a poisonous but complicated handful — a dark and deadly echo of his hero and model,…

The damage done resembles that found in bird flu as well as ‘acute respiratory distress symptom,’ reports Branswell – the latter being a condition that can rise from a number of causes, and which kills 30% of those who get it. (That is, get ARDS, not swine flu.) Yet more signs that this is a…

I’ve noted several times here how more measured heads keep emphasizing that a) we’re working on partial information in responding to the current swine flu outbreak and b) new developments may complicate things at any point along the line. Here’s a great example of what these folks (like Effect Measure, Crof, and Avian Flu Diary)…

In a post titled “Dead, Your Majesty,” H5N1, Crof ponders why we scramble to deal with swine flu while ignoring other problems ranging from cancer to the 3000 children a day who die of malaria in Africa : Most of us are comfortably settled in rich industrial countries where problems like TB and AIDS are…

Theme of the day (again, sort of): managing expectation, or Do I panic or just ignore this thing and scoff at those who express concern? Neither, of course. I’m personally provisionally encouraged at the aggregated news from yesterday — meaning I was glad to see that though the virus is spreading, its pace doesn’t seem…

This swine flu business is moving fast now, with confirmed or reported cases popping up everywhere and the first reported death outside Mexico — a 23-month-old child in Texas — reported this morning. As Effect Measure notes Some of the fear [generated in the U.S. by this deat] will be lessened by the new knowledge…

The excellent blog H5N1 (now covering H1N1 as well, and all over it), points us to the New York Times for an op-ed by John M. Barry, author of the definitive history of the Spanish flu in the US: Where Will the Swine Flu Go Next? Excerpt: As the swine flu threatens to become the…